Stare decisis: Rhetoric and substance

Stare decisis allows common law to develop gradually and incrementally. We show howjudge-made law can steadily evolve and tend to increase efficiency even in the absence ofnew information. Judges' opinions must argue that their decisions are consistent withprecedent: this is the more costly, the greater the innovation they are introducing. As aresult, each judge effects a cautious marginal change in the law. Alternative models inwhich precedents are either strictly obeyed or totally discarded would instead predictabrupt large swings in legal rules. Thus we find that the evolution of case law isgrounded not in binary logic fixing judges' constraints, but in costly rhetoric shapingtheir incentives. We apply this finding to an assessment of the role of analogicalreasoning in shaping the joint development of different areas of law.

Caution, children crossing: Heterogeneity of victim's cost of care and negligence rule

The paper deals with a bilateral accident situation in which victims haveheterogeneous costs of care. With perfect information,efficient care bythe injurer raises with the victim's cost. When the injurer cannot observeat all the victim's type, and this fact can be verified by Courts, first-bestcannot be implemented with the use of a negligence rule based on thefirst-best levels of care. Second-best leads the injurer to intermediate care,and the two types of victims to choose the best response to it. This second-bestsolution can be easily implemented by a negligence rule with second-best as duecare. We explore imperfect observation of the victim's type, characterizing theoptimal solution and examining the different legal alternatives when Courts cannotverify the injurers' statements. Counterintuitively, we show that there is nodifference at all between the use by Courts of a rule of complete trust and arule of complete distrust towards the injurers' statements. We then relate thefindings of the model to existing rules and doctrines in Common Law and Civil Lawlegal systems.

O processo de implementação da auditoria interna numa autarquia local

O contexto atual que premeia o mundo das organizações exige muitas mudanças nos processos administrativos, principalmente, ao planeamento e controlo das operações económico-financeiras, de modo que os padrões de eficiência e eficácia garantem a sobrevivência organizacional. A auditoria interna tem-se demonstrado a sua real importância, destacando-se como uma eficiente ferramenta de apoio à administração, para verificação da eficiência e eficácia das atividades e a identificação de todos os procedimentos internos e das políticas definidas pela organização. No domínio das organizações públicas, particularmente as Autarquias Locais, as entidades reconhecem a importante necessidade de implementar uma Auditoria Interna que permitem que estas atuam de forma eficiente e eficaz. É neste contexto, que o presente trabalho tem como objetivo geral demonstrar em termos teóricos e práticos a importância da implementação da Auditoria Interna num Município e a sua contribuição para a melhoria da eficiência na gestão do município em estudo, assim como os objetivos específicos. A fundamentação teórica assenta-se na luz das contribuições teóricas de uma análise exploratória dos documentos, revisão bibliográfica, artigos, diretivas e monografias, bem como análise de recursos da internet, pesquisas de diferentes sites relacionados com o tema, visando a aquisição de um bom nível de conhecimento. O estudo de caso foi realizado na Câmara Municipal do Porto Novo, onde foi-me concedido um estágio profissional que permitiu uma melhor interação com o objeto de estudo por forma a apresentar uma melhor proposta. The current context that rewards the world organizations requires many changes in administrative procedures, especially the planning and control of economic-financial operations, so that the standards of efficiency and effectiveness to ensure organizational survival. Internal audit has demonstrated its real importance, especially as an effective tool to support the management, to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of activities and identification of all internal procedures and policies defined by the organization. In the field of public organizations, particularly the Local Government, companies recognize the necessity of implementing a Municipal Internal Auditing, so that they could operate efficiently and effectively. In this context, the present work aims to demonstrate in general, in theoretical and practical terms the importance of the implementation of Internal Audit in a municipality and its contribution in the improvement of efficiency in the management of the municipality under study, as well as the specific objectives. The theoretical support is based on the light of the theoretical contributions of an exploratory analysis of documents, literature review, articles, monographs and policies, as well as analysis of Internet resources, research different sites related to the subject, aimed of acquiring a good level of knowledge. The case study was conducted in the Municipality of Porto Novo, where I was awarded an internship that allowed me to have much interaction with the organization so I could present better suggestions.

Iowa Tax Expenditures Report 2000

Exemptions, exclusions, credits against tax and reductions in tax base that are tied to specific provisions in tax law; estimation of the annual dollar effect for each of those provisions. Phase 1 Report including Corporate Income, Individual Income, Sales Tax Use Tax.

A theory of international conflict management and sanctioning

In this paper we analyze sanctioning policies in international law. We develop a model of international military conflict where the conflicting countries can be a target of international sanctions. These sanctions constitute an equilibrium outcome of an international political market for sanctions, where different countries trade political influence. We show that the level of sanctions in equilibrium is strictly positive but limited, in the sense that higher sanctions would exacerbate the military conflict, not reduce it. We then propose an alternative interpretation to the perceived lack of effectiveness of international sanctions, by showing that the problem might not be one of undersanctioning but of oversanctioning.

Record keeping by Swiss physiotherapists--a national survey of knowledge regarding legal requirements.

A national survey conducted in Switzerland aimed to evaluate the knowledge of physiotherapists regarding the legal requirements for record keeping and to collect their feedback about record keeping in general. Three physiotherapists from various professional practice groups and a lawyer specialised in health law developed a questionnaire that was sent to the 7,753 members of two existing national associations of physiotherapists. The questionnaire evaluated the participants' knowledge by calculating a score of legal knowledge, which had a maximum of 30 points. We included 825 questionnaires in the analysis. The large majority (83.4%) of participants confessed an ignorance of the legal requirements concerning record keeping prior to the survey. The average score of legal compatibility was 8 points. The younger age of the physiotherapists was a significant predictor of having knowledge of the legal requirements for record keeping (p <0.001). The participants had an appreciation of the value of records, but they did not have the relevant knowledge regarding the legal requirements for keeping records. The participants blamed a lack of time and remuneration for their failure to keep records according to known requirements. All practising allied health professionals should keep up-to-date and accurate records that conform to active legal requirements and existing international guidelines. In addition to the existing legal requirements, the emergence of e-health and the electronic era will trigger major changes in patient record management by physiotherapists.

Iowa Tax Expenditures Report 2005

Exemptions, exclusions, credits against tax and reductions in tax base that are tied to specific provisions in tax law; estimation of the annual dollar effect for each of those provisions.

Market institutions and judicial rulemaking

Assuming that the degree of discretion granted to judges was the main distinguishing feature between common and civil law until the 19th century, we argue that constraining judicial discretion was instrumental in protecting freedom of contract and developing the market order in civil law. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the history of Western law. In England, a unique institutional balance between the Crown and the Parliament guaranteed private property and prompted the gradual evolution towards a legal framework that facilitated market relationships, a process that was supported by the English judiciary. On the Continent, however, legal constraints on the market were suppressed in a top-down fashion by the founders of the liberal state, often against the will of the incumbent judiciary. Constraining judicial discretion there was essential for enforcing freedom of contract and establishing the legal order of the market economy. In line with this evidence, our selection hypothesis casts doubts on the normative interpretation of empirical results that proclaim the superiority of one legal system over another, disregarding the local conditions and institutional interdependencies on which each legal system was grounded.

Q&A: Furloughs, Bumping, and IPERS Benefits 2010-2012, June 20, 2010

The new law makes the following changes: (a) Reduces IPERS benefits not yet earned by regular members and raises contributions for them above the rate set in current law. (b) Raises the limit on how much contributions for regular members can change each year from 0.5 percentage point to 1.0 percentage point. (c) Extends a provision for restoring wage credits for mandatory unpaid time and extends it to union bumping. Other changes are limited in scope and will not affect most members; some changes are merely technical.

Deficit, human capital and economic growth dynamics

Long-run economic growth arouses a great interest since it can shed light on the income-path of an economy and try to explain the large differences in income we observe across countries and over time. The neoclassical model has been followed by several endogenous growth models which, contrarily to the former, seem to predict that economies with similar preferences and technological level, do not necessarily tend to converge to similar per capita income levels. This paper attempts to show a possible mechanismthrough which macroeconomic disequilibria and inefficiencies, represented by budget deficits, may hinder human capital accumulation and therefore economic growth. Using a mixed education system, deficit is characterized as a bug agent which may end up sharply reducing the resources devoted to education and training. The paper goes a step further from the literature on deficit by introducing a rich dynamic analysis of the effects of a deficit reduction on different economic aspects.Following a simple growth model and allowing for slight changes in the law of human capital accumulation, we reach a point where deficit might sharply reduce human capital accumulation. On the other hand, a deficit reduction carried on for a long time, taking that reduction as a more efficient management of the economy, may prove useful in inducing endogenous growth. Empirical evidence for a sample of countries seems to support the theoretical assumptions in the model: (1) evidence on an inverse relationship betweendeficit and human capital accumulation, (2) presence of a strongly negative associationbetween the quantity of deficit in the economy and the rate of growth. They may prove a certain role for budget deficit in economic growth

Deficit, human capital and economic growth dynamics

Long-run economic growth arouses a great interest since it can shed light on the income-path of an economy and try to explain the large differences in income we observe across countries and over time. The neoclassical model has been followed by several endogenous growth models which, contrarily to the former, seem to predict that economies with similar preferences and technological level, do not necessarily tend to converge to similar per capita income levels. This paper attempts to show a possible mechanismthrough which macroeconomic disequilibria and inefficiencies, represented by budget deficits, may hinder human capital accumulation and therefore economic growth. Using a mixed education system, deficit is characterized as a bug agent which may end up sharply reducing the resources devoted to education and training. The paper goes a step further from the literature on deficit by introducing a rich dynamic analysis of the effects of a deficit reduction on different economic aspects.Following a simple growth model and allowing for slight changes in the law of human capital accumulation, we reach a point where deficit might sharply reduce human capital accumulation. On the other hand, a deficit reduction carried on for a long time, taking that reduction as a more efficient management of the economy, may prove useful in inducing endogenous growth. Empirical evidence for a sample of countries seems to support the theoretical assumptions in the model: (1) evidence on an inverse relationship betweendeficit and human capital accumulation, (2) presence of a strongly negative associationbetween the quantity of deficit in the economy and the rate of growth. They may prove a certain role for budget deficit in economic growth

Apprentissage automatique de la morphologie : le cas des structures racine-schème

RÉSUMÉ Cette thèse porte sur le développement de méthodes algorithmiques pour découvrir automatiquement la structure morphologique des mots d'un corpus. On considère en particulier le cas des langues s'approchant du type introflexionnel, comme l'arabe ou l'hébreu. La tradition linguistique décrit la morphologie de ces langues en termes d'unités discontinues : les racines consonantiques et les schèmes vocaliques. Ce genre de structure constitue un défi pour les systèmes actuels d'apprentissage automatique, qui opèrent généralement avec des unités continues. La stratégie adoptée ici consiste à traiter le problème comme une séquence de deux sous-problèmes. Le premier est d'ordre phonologique : il s'agit de diviser les symboles (phonèmes, lettres) du corpus en deux groupes correspondant autant que possible aux consonnes et voyelles phonétiques. Le second est de nature morphologique et repose sur les résultats du premier : il s'agit d'établir l'inventaire des racines et schèmes du corpus et de déterminer leurs règles de combinaison. On examine la portée et les limites d'une approche basée sur deux hypothèses : (i) la distinction entre consonnes et voyelles peut être inférée sur la base de leur tendance à alterner dans la chaîne parlée; (ii) les racines et les schèmes peuvent être identifiés respectivement aux séquences de consonnes et voyelles découvertes précédemment. L'algorithme proposé utilise une méthode purement distributionnelle pour partitionner les symboles du corpus. Puis il applique des principes analogiques pour identifier un ensemble de candidats sérieux au titre de racine ou de schème, et pour élargir progressivement cet ensemble. Cette extension est soumise à une procédure d'évaluation basée sur le principe de la longueur de description minimale, dans- l'esprit de LINGUISTICA (Goldsmith, 2001). L'algorithme est implémenté sous la forme d'un programme informatique nommé ARABICA, et évalué sur un corpus de noms arabes, du point de vue de sa capacité à décrire le système du pluriel. Cette étude montre que des structures linguistiques complexes peuvent être découvertes en ne faisant qu'un minimum d'hypothèses a priori sur les phénomènes considérés. Elle illustre la synergie possible entre des mécanismes d'apprentissage portant sur des niveaux de description linguistique distincts, et cherche à déterminer quand et pourquoi cette coopération échoue. Elle conclut que la tension entre l'universalité de la distinction consonnes-voyelles et la spécificité de la structuration racine-schème est cruciale pour expliquer les forces et les faiblesses d'une telle approche. ABSTRACT This dissertation is concerned with the development of algorithmic methods for the unsupervised learning of natural language morphology, using a symbolically transcribed wordlist. It focuses on the case of languages approaching the introflectional type, such as Arabic or Hebrew. The morphology of such languages is traditionally described in terms of discontinuous units: consonantal roots and vocalic patterns. Inferring this kind of structure is a challenging task for current unsupervised learning systems, which generally operate with continuous units. In this study, the problem of learning root-and-pattern morphology is divided into a phonological and a morphological subproblem. The phonological component of the analysis seeks to partition the symbols of a corpus (phonemes, letters) into two subsets that correspond well with the phonetic definition of consonants and vowels; building around this result, the morphological component attempts to establish the list of roots and patterns in the corpus, and to infer the rules that govern their combinations. We assess the extent to which this can be done on the basis of two hypotheses: (i) the distinction between consonants and vowels can be learned by observing their tendency to alternate in speech; (ii) roots and patterns can be identified as sequences of the previously discovered consonants and vowels respectively. The proposed algorithm uses a purely distributional method for partitioning symbols. Then it applies analogical principles to identify a preliminary set of reliable roots and patterns, and gradually enlarge it. This extension process is guided by an evaluation procedure based on the minimum description length principle, in line with the approach to morphological learning embodied in LINGUISTICA (Goldsmith, 2001). The algorithm is implemented as a computer program named ARABICA; it is evaluated with regard to its ability to account for the system of plural formation in a corpus of Arabic nouns. This thesis shows that complex linguistic structures can be discovered without recourse to a rich set of a priori hypotheses about the phenomena under consideration. It illustrates the possible synergy between learning mechanisms operating at distinct levels of linguistic description, and attempts to determine where and why such a cooperation fails. It concludes that the tension between the universality of the consonant-vowel distinction and the specificity of root-and-pattern structure is crucial for understanding the advantages and weaknesses of this approach.

Iowa Transportation Laws, HR-234, 1985

Research project HR-234 was sponsored by the Iowa Highway Research Board and the Iowa Department of Transportation. In the preparation of this compilation of highway and street laws of Iowa, an attempt has been made to include those sections of the Code to which reference is frequently required by the Department of Transportation, counties, cities and towns in their conduct of highway and street administration, construction and maintenance. Because of the broad scope of highway and street work and the many interrelated provisions of Iowa law, and in the interests of keeping this volume in a convenient and usable size, some Code provisions which have some bearing on the principal subject were of necessity omitted. The volume has been compiled in loose leaf form with the expectation that periodic updates will keep the reader informed regarding changes in the law and/or new laws. A general index is provided at the end of the text of this volume. Each major topic is divided into relevant subtopics and are accompanied by appropriate Code sections. This publication is offered with the hope and belief that it will prove to be of value and assistance to those concerned with the problems of establishing, maintaining and administering a highway and street system. The reader is cautioned to consult legal counsel on all matters beyond the scope of this text.

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